How Our Marketing Team Used Sprint Planning While Working Remotely

Making sure every participant has immediate visibility on the information makes it easier to map cross dependencies and avoids storing the info in 10+ different places. Daily scrum is not limited to teams that share a physical location. If the teams are working remotely, the ceremony can be conducted with video conferencing or another group chat. Any items not completed in previous sprints might be moved to the backlog. New items that might have popped up during previous sprints will also be here. If a company chooses an hour of planning per sprint week, and it operates on two-week sprint cycles, then each sprint meeting should be no more than two hours.

On Day 4, we reminded the team about the final decision and feedback from the decision-maker. Of the two final creative concepts, we also created a pitch deck for the decision-maker. Map the user journey, identify pain points along the journey, and decide how you might solve those. Pair up in teams of two to brainstorm topics for the promotional concept.

The sprint retrospective isn’t a blame game but a means to identify and rectify issues that have come up over the course of the sprint. It is also an instrument to congratulate the team on a job well done when there were no issues. But, if the mantra of scrum is to always seek to improve, then the retrospective must be critical, too, but only as a steppingstone to improvements. Because scrum is part of an agile process, it is all about change, which includes getting feedback and quickly acting on it. Scrum seeks continuous improvement and the retrospective is a method to make sure that the product and development culture is constantly improving. The reviews must meet the quality level set up by the team or they’re not considered complete and shouldn’t be demoed in the sprint review.

Collaborate For Better Scrum Ceremonies

This information helps the Scrum Master or Scrum product manager to more effectively manage the budget and timeline of the project. Even for an organization that doesn’t operate on the Scrum agile framework , sprint planning can be an extremely efficient mechanism for moving product development forward. We hope these lessons were helpful for you to start your own remote sprint session. Remember, define the big objective, get the right people, schedule an efficient meeting, and come prepared. On Day 2, the Sketch day, there were occasional unproductive moments where it seemed like the group wasn’t sure what to do next.

Easy Agile Programs enables Release Train Engineers and Program Managers to effectively manage programs at a team-of-teams level to deliver alignment at scale. A pre-planning event – separate to PI Planning – is to make sure that the ART is aligned within the broader Solution Train before they do PI Planning. It’s all about synchronising with the other ARTs to ensure the solution and organization are heading in the right direction, together.

Although having more voices nets a wider perspective, we’ve seen that smaller meetings work better because they are more productive and collaborative. If you’ve also had to remotely meet with your team to make big decisions on a project, you’ve probably faced similar challenges. Taking into account any holidays, staff leave and other conflicting priorities, establish the velocity or how much work you think can get done in this sprint. If they are saved in a spreadsheet, you can easily copy and paste them into the board and they’ll automatically create sticky notes from each cell. Usually one hour for a 1-week sprint, and up to 3 hours for a sprint that lasted a month.

That means teams and Business Owners have plenty of notice to ensure they can show up for the event. One common issue that can arise from having distributed teams tune in remotely via video and audio is too much noise and interference. Before your first session kicks off, communicate about when it’s acceptable to talk and when https://globalcloudteam.com/ teams need to use the mute button. That way, your teams will avoid getting distracted, while still ensuring everyone can participate. Some teams will change the standard PI Planning agenda to fit multiple timezones, which could mean starting the event earlier or later for some, or even running it across 3 days instead of 2.

• Besides being one of the four core Scrum ceremonies, a sprint planning meeting is an essential step in ensuring any Scrum project’s success.
• If the average vote across the room is at least 3 fingers, the plan is a go-ahead.
• Day 1 usually kicks off with a presentation from a Senior Executive or Business Owner.
• The homework part of our sprint produced good ideas of creative concepts, but when we brought our ideas back to the drawing board, they were all in different formats.
• If the teams are working remotely, the ceremony can be conducted with video conferencing or another group chat.
• Because scrum is part of an agile process, it is all about change, which includes getting feedback and quickly acting on it.

In the end, while each team can decide ways of bettering their processes; they should never choose to skip the ceremonies entirely. When ceremonies are abandoned, usually it means that the team has abandoned the underlying Sprint planning meeting principles as well; and that is something that will hinder progress. The team is given the opportunity to reflect on the product that was demoed during the review and can brainstorm ways for improvement.

scrum Essentials Cards

They highlight specific customer needs, how the current products address these needs, and potential gaps. On the flip side, without PI Planning, teams don’t have structured communication. They may not know what the other teams are working on, which can cause a lot of problems. For example, two teams might be working on different features without realising there’s a dependency which could hold up the release or require a significant rework of the code. Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning. Rather than having everyone tune in from their separate remote locations, co-locate teams as much as possible.

The creative team is able to produce impressive work because of its efficiency in execution. One component that they credited was their use of sprint planning sessions. Jira is the most popular project management tool for agile teams, so if you’re agile, chances are you’re already using it at the team level. This agenda might be perfect for you, or you might tweak it based on your team’s needs. Distributed teams, very large ARTs, and other factors might require you to get creative with the schedule. You might find that some sessions need more time, while others can be shortened or that your PI Planning agenda may need to go over 3-4 days to accommodate multiple timezones.

When Is Pi Planning Held?

The other thing that usually happens after PI Planning events is a post-PI Planning event. For example, there might be 4 teams working on a NASA spaceship mission to Mars. There are a few different types of roadmaps in SAFe, so it’s important to understand the differences and what each roadmap is meant to do. This is increasingly important as the environment for organisations continues to change and customers expect more features to be delivered more quickly.

Finally, we teamed up into pairs and worked together to determine how to solve our objective with the given information. We mapped the user flow to determine how visitors would interact with our campaign by listing pain points on the user flow where problems could arise in the user’s journey. Finally, it helped to first have the decision-maker bought in first so that he or she — who’s usually in at least a Director role — can help you get buy-in from other stakeholders.

We will also schedule the sprint 2-3 weeks in advance so that folks prepare their calendars accordingly. Lastly, we’ll get verbal agreements that the invited stakeholders can attend every session. We confirm everyone understood the tasks, goals, and objectives moving forward. Our team wanted to make decisions on our quarterly campaign’s concept — how we planned to tell the story of our campaign to an external audience. In this case, we decided that one to two-hour meetings per day were enough.

Each sprint is of a time-boxed duration during which a product increment that offers some value to the end user is delivered. Scrum lays out specific concepts and processes, and a Scrum implementation must faithfully follow each of these best practices to be successful. Like PI Planning events, post-PI Planning involves using a planning board, but rather than features, it outlines capabilities, dependencies, and milestones for each iteration and ART. Potential issues and risks are identified, discussed, and either owned, resolved, accepted, or mitigated. The development team will also participate in the scrum ceremonies.

It’s a good idea to carefully test all the equipment and connections ahead of time to minimise potential problems. The participants themselves must get ready by assigning any key roles, ensuring there’s alignment on the strategy, and ensuring the planning process is properly understood by everyone. Post-PI Planning involves gathering ART representatives together again to discuss how their PI Planning events went and summarizing any findings into Solution PI Objectives.

For instance, the terms scrum ceremonies, agile ceremonies, scrum meetings and agile meetings are often used interchangeably. However, even though the agendas for these events are similar, it’s important to note that there are key differences between agile and scrum teams. The scrum team and product owner participate in the product backlog refinement meeting. As they look over the top items on the backlog, the team will ask the type of questions that usually arise in sprint planning meetings.

After all, interpersonal conversations and coffee breaks are a part of office life, so you may want to factor in each person’s fractional availability. If you assume each person-hour is 75% productive, multiply your 234 points by .75, and you’d end up with 175.5 total capacity points per workweek. Normally, sprint planning meetings are full-day sessions, Monday to Friday. The length of your meetings will ultimately depend on the impact of your decision. If you’ve been struggling with creating an agenda for your sprint planning meeting, Conceptboard’s online whiteboard is the perfect tool to level up your planning.

Inspection and Adaptation help control any deviations so that at the end of the sprint, a maximum value product is delivered. Immediately after the conclusion of previous Sprint, next Sprint follows. Next, you’ll want to look at the team’s velocity and capacity together. Once you have your backlog of items, it’s important to estimate the time or effort it will take to complete each item.

Marketing Sprint Best Practices

It is an ongoing activity that is managed by the Product Owner, who ‘grooms’ or refines the Product Backlog to reflect the priority of tasks left to be completed by the team. The Sprint Review is the event during which the work done during the sprint is highlighted to the stakeholders. It could be a casual event or structured more formally, which is something that, again, depends on the team. Only work that has passed the Definition of Done can be complete in all aspects and can be demoed during the meeting. Stakeholders are expected to give immediate feedback, which will be incorporated into the backlog and taken up during the next sprint.

There would be a constant battle for resources, budget, and opportunities to work on the sexiest projects. Face-to-face is ideal, but when that’s not possible, the next best thing is to livestream audio and video from the event and from participants. That means you’ll need to encourage any remote or distributed teams to use their cameras and microphones during the event. It’s not quite the same as having them in the room with you, but it’s pretty close.

Agile Project Management Vs Traditional Project Management

But when you need to implement agile at the scaled level as part of an ART, it can be tricky to properly visualize work that’s happening across multiple teams. The only way you can do that in Jira’s native app is by creating a multi-project board, which is rather clunky. The good thing about PI Planning events is that they happen regularly on a fixed schedule, which means you can plan for them well ahead of time.

How Our Team Used Sprint Planning

Free TrialWhether distributed or in person, if your team gets PI Planning right, it makes everything in the upcoming increment so much easier. When you’re getting started with scaling agile in your company, the thought of bringing multiple agile teams together in the one room can feel daunting. Sprint Retrospective is used to analyze what went right in the Sprint and what could be improved upon. The Scrum Team examines the process used to build that increment. This Retrospective feedback helps improve the process in Sprints to follow. Sprint retrospective is one inspect-and-adapt opportunity at the end of each sprint.

That way, there’s more time for team planning and collaboration. For a bit of perspective – Scrum and Kanban are also agile frameworks , and these have historically been very effective at the individual team level. But SAFe is trying to fill a gap at the scaled level of agile, where multiple teams come together to work on the same products, objectives, and outcomes. Finally, when executing a sprint retrospective, ProjectManager has one-click reports that help get a picture of how the sprint went. These reports can be filtered to get just the information you need to start the next sprint.

The team will decide what tasks will be delivered at the end of the sprint and what is the work necessary to complete these tasks . For a simplified example, if you have a team of seven people putting in eight productive hours a day, you’ll find their capacity by multiplying seven team members by eight hours. This gives you 56 points per day, or 280 points per 5-day workweek.

People may feel pressure from the room to vote for a plan to go ahead, rather than speaking up about their concerns. If you do quarterly PI Planning, it’ll outline around 9 months of work. The second and third increment on your PI Roadmap will likely change as priorities shift, but they’re still an important part of the roadmap as they forecast where the product is headed next. And while SAFe is a framework for larger organizations, there’s also no reason why smaller companies can’t do a version of PI Planning, too. All you need is more than one agile team to make it worthwhile. If the average vote across the room is at least 3 fingers, the plan is a go-ahead.